Director’s Foreword

The Art of the News – Comics Journalism is the first museum exhibition and catalogue devoted to the remarkable international emergence of comics journalism in the two decades since Joe Sacco first published Palestine in 1993. Fittingly, this project and the scholarship it represents emerge from Sacco’s alma mater, the University of Oregon, where he first studied journalism. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the university is proud to present the exhibition and publish the catalogue, featuring not only Sacco’s work, but that of the other comics journalists whose work is also presented here, including Gerardo Alba, Dan Archer, Tracy Chahwan, Jesús Cossio, Sarah Glidden, Omar Khouri, Viktoria Lomasko, Sarah Mirk, Ben Passmore, Yazan Al-Saadi, and Andy Warner. Hailing from eight countries, their work demonstrates the truly global nature of this literary and artistic medium.

We are grateful to Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Assistant Professor of English and Associate Director of the Comics Studies Program, for curating the show and overseeing work on the essays and interviews in the catalogue, and serving as its co-editor. The Art of the News builds on her foundational scholarship in comics journalism, and we are delighted to collaborate with her on this important and fascinating project. I also thank her colleague, Ben Saunders, Professor of English and Director of the Comics Studies Program, for consulting on this project and working with Kelp-Stebbins to bring it to the museum’s attention. We thank the comics journalists for their commitment and the powerful testimonies so evident in their work, and we thank the UO Comics Studies students whose essays and interviews have added so much to this project. A special thanks, too, to Audra McNamee for her superb portraits of the comics journalists; they constitute a uniquely fitting contribution to this project.

As Kelp-Stebbins notes in her excellent introductory essay for this catalogue, comics journalists seek to present truths that may elude and in fact be precluded by the traditional practice of “objective” reporting. Both through their drawings and in their words, the comics journalists relate deeply personal stories from the real world, recounted in equally personal ways, whether by hand or on a computer, or a combination of both. This publication and the exhibition itself aim to

document and interrogate the methodologies of comics journalism, revealing their range and impact.

Sacco comments in his interview here that the visual dimension of comics journalism is crucial. He emphasizes that the visually narrated reports created by comics journalists help readers to literally see what the story is, and thereby feel the human dimensions of each story more deeply. He mentions antecedents such as the London Illustrated Weekly and Harper’s, and we can also look at the works of 19th century artists such as Honoré Daumier or William Hogarth as partial forerunners. Daumier’s pointed and at times partisan commentaries on the French politics and personages of his day would seem to be particularly apt prototypes for the political engagements on view in so many of the works in the show. Yet comics journalism represents a distinct evolution of its own, a form that deliberately slows itself down in order to dig more deeply into the questions, situations, and voices that the comics journalists present to us. As Kelp-Stebbins observes, comics journalism repudiates “the all-too-rapid flow of the 24-hour news cycle” in favor of in-depth inquiry, “while insisting on the human dignity of the subjects whose lives they document.”

My thanks to Kurt Neugebauer, the museum’s Associate Director of Administration and Exhibitions, for overseeing and designing the installation of The Art of the News, and shepherding this catalogue to completion. The exhibition was installed beautifully in our Barker Gallery by Joey Capadona, Mark O’Hara, Michael White, and Beth Hartpence-Robinson from our installation staff. Mike Bragg, the museum’s designer, is responsible for the elegant production of this book. Publication and gallery text editing was done with the expert and much appreciated assistance of Susan Mannheimer. We thank Irene Arce for her Spanish translations of the gallery texts, and UO Comics Studies grad student Debarghya Sanyal for his coordination and supervision of the artist interviews. My thanks to Debbie Williamson-Smith for her work on publicity and communications, and to Esther Harclerode, Mackenzie Karp, and Karri Pargeter for their successful work on exhibition fundraising.

The museum gratefully acknowledges that The Art of the News: Comics Journalism exhibition and related programs are made possible with the generous support of the Coeta and Donald Barker Changing Exhibitions Endowment, The Ford Family Foundation, and Jeannie Schulz. We also thank the UO departments of English, Art History, Political Science, Comparative Literature, Oregon Humanities Center, Art, the Black Studies Program, and the Oregon Consortium for International and Area Studies for additional support.

Finally, I thank the members of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, our Patrons Circle, and our Leadership Council for supporting this project and all of the work we do.

John S. Weber Executive Director